Social Media

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the social media giant would begin emphasizing more "meaningful" content on users' feeds — giving greater weight to posts from friends and family and less to businesses, brands and media.

In a long Facebook post of his own, Zuckerberg stressed that the social media platform — which has more than 2 billion active users worldwide — was created "to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us."

Like the United States, Germany is grappling with fake news and hate speech and what to do about it. For decades, it has banned incitement, defamation, and phrases and symbols from the Nazi era.

But the lines have been a lot murkier when the offenses in question are on the Internet.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition tried to address the discrepancy this year with a controversial "Network Enforcement Law," which the German parliament passed on June 30, and which quietly went into effect on Oct. 1.

In the wake of last weekend’s terrorist attack in London that left seven people dead, Prime Minister Theresa May has gone beyond asking social media companies to vet content posted on their sites more fully. She’s raised the specter of holding social media platforms legally accountable for facilitating the spread of terrorist ideology.

Another potentially dangerous trend: the "eraser challenge." That's where you vigorously rub an eraser on your skin while reciting a certain phrase or the alphabet. The results can be disfiguring or worse.

A recent study from Stanford University found most teenagers couldn’t tell the difference between fake and credible news. That problem isn't limited to teens, though. Leading up to and after the election of Donald Trump, there’s been growing criticism over fake and hyper-partisan news sites. Overwhelmed social media users have even begun to cut back on their Facebook habits.

Flight running late? Searching for baggage? Forget standing in line. Send a tweet or Facebook message. A growing number of airlines are hiring social media first responders to help with customer relations, and Southwest Airlines has just joined the club. They now have nine “social care” representatives working seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.

Does social media help or hurt the quality of news coverage? NPR’s Andy Carvin redefined reporting with his crowdsourced updates on Middle East conflicts via Twitter 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hours a day. He talks to Think host Krys Boyd about his book Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring, and a Journalism Revolution at 1 p.m.